The revolutionary search feature, which allows users to query available data by asking simple questions, is rolling out to testers and eventually more users. But some criticism is rumbling amidst one early user’s launch of a blog highlighting information that is made easier to glean through Graph Search.

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“In terms of privacy and honoring privacy, we are absolutely honoring the controls that people have in the audience that they’ve selected with every piece of content that they share,” Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan said at a Data Privacy Panel at The George Washington University on Monday morning. “I think what some of these searches are showing is that there is information that people might have shared with an audience that they didn’t want to see it,” she added, touting the social network’s tools that allow users to check and adjust a data point’s privacy settings.

The company highlighted the feature’s privacy considerations from the get-go, as co-founder Mark Zuckerberg was quick to promote the feature as “privacy aware” at its unveiling earlier this month.

“Every piece of content has its own audience,” he said at the Jan. 15 roll-out. “Most content is not public. You can only search for content that has been shared with you.”

That’s the key issue for Graph Search, which has the potential to dramatically extend the social reach of Facebook. The only data available in searches are information that was already accessible to the user — so data haven’t been made any less private, at least from a technical standpoint. But it has made data — and the relationships between two or more data points, in particular — less obscure. It remains to be seen if the social network’s one-billion-strong user base categorizes that as privacy issue.

“We’ve always had search functionality on Facebook. This is an improvement of that search functionality, whereby you can search information that other people have shared,” Egan explained. “But you’re only allowed to see information when you’re in the audience of that piece of information.”

That means Facebook is likely to continue full speed ahead with its privacy-education drive that ramped up late last year and took another step Monday with the rollout of “Ask the CPO,” a forum that lets users pose privacy questions directly to the proper officials.

“What’s really important to us is that people understand with whom they are sharing information. If the information is there it can be found,” Egan said. “Much better that people can up-level, they can see that, and they can control it with really meaningful, granular controls, so they can take immediate action to change the audience at that particular piece of content.”

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 12:29 p.m. on January 28, 2013.